Ten years before Americans set foot on the moon, the USSR intentionally crashed their Luna 2 probe into the lunar surface. It was the first human object to reach the moon. It also provided a simple but important scientific finding: the moon has no magnetic field. This crash-slash-success happened on September 13, 1959.

Beyond that science mission, Luna 2 carried a political payload. Inside the probe was a ball made up of pentagonal Soviet pennants, each a little steel plate engraved with “USSR January 1959” (the former two words rendered in Cyrillic script) and the USSR Coat of Arms. The ball had an explosive charge inside, which went off upon landing. This, in theory, allowed the pennants to break apart and litter the moon’s surface around Mare Imbrium (the landing site). When Khrushchev visited the US, he gave Eisenhower some replica pennants.